A major Alberta beef-processing plant that has slowed its operations due to an outbreak of COVID-19 is returning to two shifts a day today for the first time in a month.

JBS, the company that owns the southern Alberta plant, had reduced operations to one shift of between 700 and 1,100 employees after some 650 workers, according to Alberta Health, tested positive for COVID-19. One employee died, 638 recovered and 11 are still considered as having active cases.

A spokesperson for the company said it’s implemented more than 100 new safety measures since January, including temperature tests of all workers entering the plant, providing and requiring face masks and physical partitions on production lines.

JBS and Cargill’s meat-processing plant in High River, Alta., where close to half its 2,000 employees contracted COVID-19, combine to process around 70 per cent of Canada’s beef.

Two House committees and the special COVID-19 committee of the whole will meet today.

Small Business, Export and International Trade Minister Marg Ng is taking part in the House finance committee meeting. The president of the Fish, Food and Allied Workers, Keith Sullivan, will also be testifying to the same group of MPs this afternoon.

The annual meeting of the federal, provincial and territorial agriculture ministers has been postponed from July to October, due to the pandemic. They’re now planning to meet Oct. 14-16 in Guelph. Real Agriculture has more details.

In Canada

Tweaks to the eligibility criteria designed to help more businesses access the $40,000 interest-free Canada Emergency Business Account should help more farmers access loans. Qualifying businesses had a requirement of having a minimum payroll of $20,000 last year, which some producers struggled to meet. Real Agriculture has more details about the expansion of the program.

Internationally

While U.S. President Donald Trump raised the possibility of halting cattle imports to help an industry hit by slaughterhouse logjams, the largest American cattle trade group, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association or NCBA, said Brazilian beef is the real threat, rather than livestock shipments.

“Our concern is how the administration has approved beef imports from countries that we don’t have trade agreements with, like Brazil,” Kent Bacus, senior director for international trade at the NCBA, told Bloomberg.

The European Commission unveiled plans yesterday to protect biodiversity across the 27-nation bloc while building a more sustainable food system by reducing the use of pesticides and promoting organic farming. In line with its ambition of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to zero by mid-century, the EU’s executive arm wants to halve the use of chemical pesticides by 2030 and to ensure that at least 25 per cent of agricultural land is reserved for organic farming, compared to the current standard of 8 per cent, reported the Associated Press.